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interesting. i felt proud of my city watching the video montage in the first half of the clip. i then felt nauseated listening to the...
adriane:
Now we are splitting healthy hairs. Words like this become obsolete as culture changes and seeds drift. Botanicaly, the ability to debate (what this...
~the velvet ninja~:
good call. While we’re at it, can we scrap the word “trapezoid” and replace it with “rectrangle?” For those...
anya:
so really we should call doormen janitors & janitors hygienes.
Matt:
The effect is statistically significant but not super large, maybe not clinically significant. Here’s the numbers from the paper: “people...
TitaniumDreads:
Hi Jesse! No, a blog is not a decent or reliable method of contacting someone. Especially if it’s the only method you’ve put out...
~the velvet ninja~:
Level 3: Remove yourself from the equation. Burn your car and zip past all that bullshit on a scooter.
Leslie Bradshaw:
Dustin ~ Thanks again for the shout out and for getting in touch. As I mentioned in my note back to you over Facebook, running the ad was as...
adriane:
more specifically, I disagree with the idea that Rastafarians believe in Selassie because they are “hopelessly baked”. For instance,...
Swami:
U spread lies and rumor, and ur only motivation is to put down what ur not familiar with and don’t understand. Vanity and ego u worship, while...
TitaniumDreads:
Selasi ran numerous torture centers for dealing with political dissidents. He was widely known for a wildly irrational temper and being...
adriane:
totally disagree with your views about Rastafarianism: it’s insulting, callous and shortsighted if you ask me…but who asked me anyways....
TitaniumDreads:
ohh, most historians are up to far more than their ankles in bullshit.
velvet ninja:
That is a helper elephant. On a trampoline.
velvet ninja:
4. Something being flown around that was designed to give fucked up radar readings. 5. ninjas 6. flying monkeys. “We’re not in the...
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Archive for February, 2008
Yes! I fully support this. AT&T shouldn’t be allowed to operate in public without constant public opposition like this.
:: Via boing boing ::
Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.
- Dan Rather
This experimental session was the first time in 42 years that a psychedelic was administered to a research subject at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Walter Pahnke, who conducted the classic Good Friday experiment in 1962, reported on the conclusion of his psilocybin research at Harvard in an unpublished paper written in 1966 (PDF).
The renaissance in psychedelic research has begun. It is now time to prove what we have been claiming for decades, that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can be beneficial to some patients in carefully controlled clinical settings. The promising results from MAPS’ US MDMA/PTSD research, and the start of Dr. Halpern’s MDMA/cancer anxiety study, suggest that the eventual approval of psychedelic psychotherapy is becoming more than a dream.
Can a $10-billion university restore science to the Islamic world?
On the shores of the Red Sea, near a small fishing village called Thuwal, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is launching a university with the ambition of making it a world leader in science and technology. Not only will the school—called King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)—possess one of the 10 largest university endowments in the world, it will also allow women and men to study side by side. The greatest challenge that the potentially revolutionary school now faces is attracting faculty and students.
Science once flourished in the Islamic world, a legacy seen today in the West with the use of Arabic numerals and words such as “algebra.†After the golden age of Islam ended with the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, this momentum vanished. “It’s recognized in several [United Nations] reports that the Arab and Muslim world now lags behind in science,†says Ahmad Al-Khowaiter, interim provost for KAUST. Such an assessment includes, for instance, the amount of money expended on research relative to the size of a country’s economy and the total number of research papers published and patents registered.
:: Full Article Unavailable without Subscription to SciAm ::
A quick note on this. Scientific american is loosing money because it doesn’t understand how the internet works. Charging people for content doesn’t work anymore because the web isn’t just a big digital magazine. Put everything up for free and get your profits from advertising.
:: KAUST.edu.sa via email (Thanks Doz!) ::
This is from an article Tuition-Free MIT that Kimpossible linked to in the comment thread of the Stanford Tuition post.
My top students in Course 6 are all telling me that they don’t want to be engineers. They are heading for professional school. We will live in a society where the best educated engineers are not designing anti-lock brakes. They are either managing comparatively poorly educated people who are designing anti-lock brakes, stitching up wounds in people who were injured by faulty anti-lock brakes, or defending companies that got sued for their anti-lock brake systems that didn’t work.
So farewell, Fidel. You were truly the undisputed world champion of the Cold War, as far as facial hair is concerned.
Yes, that is Konrad’s real name.
In a radical change to its financial aid program, Stanford University will announce today that it will no longer charge tuition to students whose families earn less than $100,000 a year. In addition, the university will waive room and board fees for students whose families earn less than $60,000 a year. University President John Hennessy will make the announcement today on campus.
The university is making the change in the wake of published reports last month that its endowment had grown almost 22 percent last year, to $17.1 billion. That sum had begun to attract attention from lawmakers who want wealthy institutions to do more to reduce tuition costs.
:: SfGate via Email (Thanks Doz!!) ::
Harvards endowment is twice that and grew at 23%, ohhh snap!
memo to the fucking government: Not all the motivated kids are rich. Free education makes for a more prosperous society.
:: Via Vice Magazine ::
:: via Flickr ::
The branch of our government that conducts military actions is called “The Defense Department.” If you enter military service you are “Defending the Country.” It drives me nuts that everyone just agrees to refer to our military by it’s own bullshit framing propaganda. The defense department very rarely does any defending, the vast, VAST majority of the time it just attacks poor brown people with untapped natural resources.
PEOPLE!!!! STOP USING THEIR WORDS!!
The public dialogue is totally based around the concept of “supporting the troops” even though that doesn’t mean anything. The whole point is to divert public attention from the question that actually matters, do you support our policies?
Martin Heidegger said it best in 1947s the Letter on Humanism
Language is the house of Being and in its home we dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
I wrote this a while ago and never published it because I wanted to make it one of those fancy three part blog posts. I think there’s a lot of power in realizing when you are never going to do something and just letting it go.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture yesterday asked U.S. farmers to keep their cloned animals off the market indefinitely even as Food and Drug Administration officials announced that food from cloned livestock is safe to eat. Bruce I. Knight, the USDA’s undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, requested an ongoing “voluntary moratorium” to buy time for “an acceptance process” that Knight said consumers in the United States and abroad will need, “given the emotional nature of this issue.”
Yet even as the two agencies sought a unified message — that food from clones is safe for people but perhaps dangerous to U.S. markets and trade relations — evidence surfaced suggesting that Americans and others are probably already eating meat from the offspring of clones. Executives from the nation’s major cattle cloning companies conceded yesterday that they have not been able to keep track of how many offspring of clones have entered the food supply, despite a years-old request by the FDA to keep them off the market pending completion of the agency’s safety report.
FDA: Hey, did you write down that stuff about about the experimental untested food like I asked?
Beef Industry: ohhh duuuuude, I totally forgot. My bad!
Now! from the people who brought you mad cow disease, CLONED MEAT!!!
You seriously have to read this whole article, it’s a fucking riot.
USDA Recommends Food From Clones Stay Off the Market
My favorite part is when the cattle/biotech companies are all “Cloning is just a way to make offspring” it’s like invitro fertilization. wtf, no seriously WTF!?!? Although maybe my favorite part is when the article talks about how the few clones that do survive are plagued with birth defects and abnormally high rates of disease but don’t worry, it’s safe to eat! And besides, we can’t label it because that would just keep people from buying it.
While the future is bright and shiny, it’s just as corrupt on the inside.
—-
A couple days ago the USDA issued the biggest beef recall in history, 143 million pounds. I’ve seen several articles on this and most of them gloss over a few salient points that I’d like to reiterate here
-This recall goes back two years. Wait, seriously? Yes, that is physically impossible and I’m concerned that there is no one in the media rational enough to collapse in ridicule.
-A two year recall means that most of this meat has already been consumed.
-Downed cattle requirements are in place because of mad cow disease. My understanding is that these regulations as they (ahem) stand right now are seriously inadequate. Also, mad cow disease is seriously under reported because there are strong disincentives for telling the truth.
-Almost universally the articles that I’ve seen completely fail to critically engage the beef industry’s claims about the safety of the food supply. I’ll try my best to paraphrase
Beef Industry: “The government forced us to recall an insanely large amount of meat because it’s been unsafe for two years. We didn’t notice that but trust us, eating meat is 100% safe.”
Journalists: “okay, well, we’ll just repeat your logically incoherent soundbite ad nauseum so that people don’t accidentally get really pissed off about how incompetent and greedy you are.”
-This is a recall spurred on by a video recorded secretly and delivered to the humane society. This didn’t come out because of vigilant regulators. I highly recommend watching the video.
A priest, a monk, and a rabbi walk into a bar. They all sit down and each order a martini. They get to talking about the deep stuff, religion, philosophy, you know, the meaning of it all. Three hours later they leave with a feeling of enlightenment and a respect for one another that will last a lifetime.
Remember, your project isn’t ‘late’ (because you were at Ipanema Beach in Rio for example) the project timeline was ‘too aggressive.’
:: Photo via Pedro Meyer ::
yes! Test complete. Google analytics is now running on titaniumdreads.com. It is really easy and super the most awesome. It’s widely considered the best interface for a log cruncher, even myspace uses it. Try it out :)
for those of you you don’t give a damn about data metrics, here are some lolz.
OMG! Animated star wars movie comes out in August!!!!!….!!!!!!!!!
Preview! :: Producer Nerd Guy Talking About Series! (includes anakins padawan!!)
I’d also like to take this opportunity to recommend the Revenge of the Sith Novelization by Matthew Stover. You can buy it on amazon for 1 freaking penny! “Outstanding” and “Better than the movie” come up a lot in the amazon reviews. There’s probably an obvious response in saying that besting a piece of shit movie is not exactly a literary feat. However, I believe the book is a masterfully written piece of science fiction in it’s own right. Here’s my contentious perspective: Episode 3 actually has a plot, it’s just so big and unexplained that most people don’t know it’s there.
Here’s a relevant review that mirrors my own opinions:
Once freed of a film’s running time Stover could really take his time fleshing out issues that the movie was forced to speed through. For example, he made it clear as day why tension had mounted between the Jedi and Palpatine, and the current political climate on Courasant.
The relationship between Anakin and Palpatine is explored much more then in the movie. In the scene when Palpatine revealed himself to Anakin, Palpatine’s emphasis on his right to live and his prediction that the Jedi would kill him on the spot for his religious beliefs, I found, much more effective then in the film. From what I recall, the film focused more on trying to save Amadala from her predicted demise.
I thought that the effect Anakin’s visions were having on him were much better explained then in the movie. The novel, basically, had Anakin terrified to rest and exhausted from sleep depravation. This worked in that when the climatic battle between Windu and Palpatine came to a head, Anakin (who, at that point, was nothing short of delerious from exhustion) obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.
I loved the way that the relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan developed. It was very well illustrated that Anakin was always using Obi-Wan as his emotional anchor and when removed of that, just how easily he could be manipulated by someone Anakin saw as never having lied to him.
The only thing that I wound up dinging the novel for was the Wookies role and Yoda’s escape. It’s virtually missing, as if someone just accidentally edited it out. It was really bizarre that it was just … not there.
Outstanding book though, as much as I liked the film, the book is significantly better.
Here’s the critical difference that I think most people miss in the comparisons between episodes 4,5,6 (universally praised) and e’s 1,2, and 3 (nearly universally hated on). 456 were a self contained storyline. In fact, 4, was a self contained film bc lucas didn’t know if he was going to have enough money to make 5 and 6. Since then Lucas has become a gajillionaire and hundreds of novels, comic books, action figures have emerged to create a universe. Episodes 2,3 seem weird because they AREN”T self contained, they are slices of that universe. Yes, I agree that might have not been the best choice for a film release but once you accept it and eat the media around them a brilliant story comes out. Definitely Check the previews and at least look at the ep3 book.
Sometimes I feel like my approach to politics is like trying to stop spam by telling as many people as possible that penis enlargement pills can’t possibly work.
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